Fates Weekly Update #65

Hello, folks. Now that AGDQ is over, the distractions are over and work begins to kick into overdrive again. They raised over a million dollars for charity! Very impressive, glad to know that our community of gamers can come together for such a good cause. Back to work and there is a lot of it!

Writing: When I started working on the investigation sections, I made a vow that I was going to do something much better than Phoenix Wright when it came to presenting items and profiles to various people in your investigation. I love how they did a lot of things and took several to mold to my purposes, but there was one thing that always annoyed me. When you presented pieces of evidence to people that wouldn’t give you clues or viable input, they would use the same exact response no matter what piece was given to them. A picture would get the same reaction that a bloody knife would! It annoyed me a fair bit because it broke some of the world immersion and completely threw away a good piece of storytelling.

So we decided that every piece of presentable items would give a different response. It would drastically increase the amount of writing required, but it also gives it that little extra bit of immersion for the game. Certain characters are easier to write these than others. Alexi, for example, is a lot easier than Yoi. Alexi is easier because she just doesn’t care. The more items you present to her, the less and less she cares. Yoi takes things seriously. Well, seriously out of this world. When you present a rune you find on one of the planets, Alexi helpfully tells you that she doesn’t care what it is with her feet up on the desk. Yoi, however, will helpfully tell you she has totally never seen that before, but she’ll give you ideas on what it might be. And the other characters as well.

Which means there is going to be a large number of options in the interactions that are going to depend on if you’ve presented evidence to people. Good things and bad things are going to be determined by if you want to give clues to people. For example, giving Alexi the rune is going to result in… absolutely nothing. She doesn’t know, she doesn’t have a need to know, and she isn’t going to know in five seconds. If you give Yoi the rune, she might be able to tell you what it means, but she’s very much a gossip. With your allies and enemies blended together… do you want to tell her? There’s going to be a lot of varying routes. Reborn might not have given you those selections in the story, but Fates is certainly defying that as the writing continues on.

Hope experiment: As some astute people noticed from my phrasing last week, I haven’t completely given up on the idea of a staggered release. Since there is a lot of disinterest in the ideas, I’d like to give it a test run to see how viable it is and how it would work. As Hope is preparing for a release soon, I would like to use it as the test vehicle. Hope will be released in three segments that will be updated roughly three weeks apart from each other. What does that mean? It means as soon as we get the trailer video finished, we are going to start pushing for Greenlight and getting Hope into your hands!

That’s all for this week. Hopefully we should have some much more exciting stuff to talk about next week! Until then, Chief out!